Folklore of Yorkshire by Kai Roberts

Wantley, and this provides a vivid retelling of the template from which all such narratives in the county (with the exception of one) seem to have been drawn. The Wantley story survives in such detail largely because it was immortalised as a popular ballad, which circulated widely as a printed broadside in the seventeenth century. The earliest surviving version comes from 1685, titled ‘An Excellent Ballad of the Dreadful Combat Fought between Moore of Moore-Hall and the Dragon of Wantley’ and it was subsequently included in the 1794 edition of Bishop Percy’s seminal collection Reliques of Ancient English Poetry .
    Although no such place as ‘Wantley’ exists in the county, the name is generally agreed to have arisen from a corruption of the village of Wortley and the nearby Wharncliffe Crags in South Yorkshire’s Don Valley, a supposition supported by the ballad’s correspondence with the topography of that area. The ballad relates that the dragon made its home amongst a hilltop escarpment, supposed to be Wharncliffe Crags, and from its den there ravaged the locality – devouring livestock, trees, houses and children, all whilst polluting the air with its hot, stinking breath. It often stopped at a well to drink, where it turned the water to ‘burning brandy’.
    The folk of the vicinity were so traumatised by the dragon’s merciless assaults that they were forced to beg the aid of a ‘furious knight’ known as Moore of Moore-Hall. The ballad makes Moore himself sound like a scarcely less terrifying prospect than the dragon; a bawdy, hell-raising type who once in anger swung a horse by the tail and mane until it was dead, and then proceeded to eat its carcass! Still, there was probably no better hope to defeat such a beast as the dragon and Moore assented, on the sole condition that he was sent a sixteen-year-old girl to ‘anoint him’ overnight before the combat and dress him in the morning.

    Wharncliffe Crags above the Don Valley, once home to the famed Wantley Dragon. (Kai Roberts)
    Despite his formidable strength, Moore realised that the dragon was more than an equal to him in might alone, so decided to rely on cunning to defeat it. To this end he had the steelworkers of Sheffield forge him a suit of armour covered in spikes so that the dragon could not grapple with him, and then hid in the well from which the beast was wont to drink in order to ambush it. Despite Moore’s element of surprise, the two opponents were evenly matched and their struggle lasted for two days and a night, with neither receiving so much as a wound. Finally, however, Moore delivered a lucky blow to the only vulnerable spot on the dragon’s body – noted in earlier, less sanitised versions of the ballad as its anus – at which the monster fell down and expired.
    Whilst this ballad displays all the classic themes of a Yorkshire dragon narrative, many scholars have erroneously stated that the ballad is not an authentic local legend but actually a polemic against a historical landowner. The suggestion originates with Godfrey Bosville, a correspondent of Bishop Percy, whose theory was included as a footnote in Reliques of Ancient English Poetry . Bosville asserted that the ballad satirised a late sixteenth-century legal case in which Sir Francis Wortley and his tenants were embroiled over payment of tithes. According to this reading, Sir Francis is personified as the voracious dragon and Moore of Moore-Hall as the lawyer sent by the tenants to do battle with him.
    Later, in his 1819 History of Hallamshire , the esteemed antiquarian Reverend Joseph Hunter conjectured that the ballad could refer to another dispute earlier in the sixteenth century, which arose when Sir Thomas Wortley attempted to depopulate Wharncliffe Chase to create a personal hunting ground. Yet whilst these theories have been uncritically repeated by commentators on the legend ever since, doubt was cast as early as 1864 by the local historian John Holland.